Interference (23 page)

John instinctively looks around for his daughter. Of course she's not there.

He sits up in his seat and watches her, watches the game.

When she finally notices him he knows it immediately. Her face pales. Her body stiffens. She stares, mouth open. After the game John walks slowly out of the arena, opening the door for a sweaty woman as she struggles through, carrying her hockey bag and stick. Back to where he was headed. His plan has now changed. She saw him so taking Carrie won't be as good revenge. There won't be that twenty minutes of terror for Dayton. Instead, John will wait for Dayton at her house. And then he will take Carrie. Straight from her arms.

The tree is there. Gigantic and old and powerful. A nice house set back from the street, the front yard all tree. The lights are on downstairs. No car in the driveway. John moves silently around the house, scoping out the backyard, the windows (curtains on all of them), the tree. And then he starts walking around the street, checking out the neighbours' houses, peering from the sidewalk into some of the lit-up windows. He walks to the house next door and sneaks a look into the back through the wire gate of their fence. Their curtains are open and John can see a man sitting in a reclining chair in front of the TV. John startles. Stops dead in his tracks. Until he realizes the man is fast asleep, leaned back, his feet up. The TV plays a hockey game and John watches for a bit before he moves on, down the street, towards the corner. He can see the glimpse of a pool through a spotty hedge in one person's backyard. The rain falling on the winter covering. He glances at a swing set behind another house. From where he stands it looks rusted and half broken. Dayton's yard, in contrast to her neighbours' yards, is empty. No toys, no barbeque, no chairs. Nothing. Although winter has just ended. Or maybe she never goes outside?

Across the street and up. John is walking back and forth, wearing down the sidewalk. Back towards Dayton's house, but on the other side of the street. Waiting for her. Some of these houses have fences and a dog barks fiercely at one house when John passes. He can see its shadow in the front window. He's walking slowly, ducking into the shadows whenever a car passes, when he hears them coming up the street. Later John realizes how stupid he is. Who cares if anyone sees him now? Dayton has seen him. His plan has changed. In fact, the more people who see him, the better his chance of getting Carrie back. But he hears people coming and so, not thinking clearly, tired from the long flight and the time change, from the day that seemed to stretch out forever, John ducks up the side of a house across from Dayton's and crouches in the bushes. He waits within inches of the fence, feeling trapped by his predicament, by the huge house beside him, by the rain that is still falling.

“Oh, I'm out of breath,” he can hear a man say.

Two men on the street. They pause in front of the house John is hiding behind.

“You said that before.”

John peeks around the bush and sees the two figures. One standing stiffly, looking up into the high reaches of the house where John is hiding, the other, a short man in a brown suit, scurrying around him.

“You might want to leave me alone,” the taller man says. John can't see his face, but his voice is deep and angry. “I'm not feeling very generous right now.”

“Oh my,” the other man chirps. He claps his hands. John pulls his head back. It would look bad, if he comes out from behind the bush now. If he stands and heads down the driveway, waves hello, and keeps going. They might know he doesn't live here. John waits.

“You might want to keep your distance.”

The other man says, “Oh my. It hurts.”

“Shhhhh.” And then John hears footsteps recede.

John only hears one set of footsteps walk away. The smaller man is still out front, making snuffling noises. Drunks. John leans back against the brick wall of the house. His coat scratches the bottom of a window pane, and the noise feels loud. He feels exposed.

From inside of the house he hears someone shout, “Mom” or “bomb” or “Tom,” and this startles him.

So this. This. This is how it happens: John tries to stand up without being seen (because, he tells the cops, he's trapped by the drunk man out front. But when the cops say, “Why were you hiding in the first place?” John has no answer), and so he stretches his body up slowly and peers over the bush and then he sneezes. Suddenly a dog comes tearing towards him and slams into him and John screams a little (because the dog startles him), and his scream is a bit high-pitched (he does, after all, have a cold), and then there is a little man with a brown suit standing right in front of him and John screams again. That is how it happens. He, John, did not go in through the back gate and open the back door, the man in the brown suit did. He, John, did not take the girl, the man in the brown suit did. He's sure of it. And yes, the girl went with the man easily and yes, the man smiled at John as he passed him and yes, John was immobilized by the dog, who didn't need to bite him or, if the dog did need to bite John, the dog could have let go of his leg, let go of the death grip — John was sure he could feel the dog's teeth on his ankle bone, holding on. John says this later as an excuse for why he didn't go after the little man in the brown suit leading the girl away. After all, John's wife stole Carrie from him. His small daughter — no, he's not sure exactly how old she is now, but she's still a baby. Just a baby. After all, John was not thinking right about everything — he hadn't been thinking right about everything since Dayton took the kid. Plus he was jet-lagged. And tired. And wet. And in pain. Remember: he was in pain. The small man opened the door. Not him. He never even went in the backyard. And, besides, why was it even open? Shouldn't people lock their doors at night? What kind of a town is this?

John would like to know that. He knows he looks suspicious and, no, he has no idea which direction they went down the street. It wasn't until the man with the huge scar on his face showed up that he finally realized the little girl had been taken from the house. It seemed so natural. She just walked past him with the man, holding his hand. There didn't seem to be a struggle. In fact, he tells the cops, he was so busy trying to kick the dog off him that he didn't see much or think much at all. But he knows what the people who live here feel like, after all, his wife stole his baby from him. When a kid is missing, that's the worst thing . . .

It went like this: first he ducks beside a bush at the side of the house to avoid the two drunk men, then he sneezes, then the dog whams into him and takes hold and he screams, then a small man in a brown suit walks calmly by (not helping him with the dog) and opens the back gate as if he lives there. Then the girl comes out with him and then they leave. All the time John is stuck to the dog. Of course the noises start then, shouts from Dayton and her friend as they come home from hockey and see him hobbling down the driveway bleeding. And then you come, John tells the cops. And they discover the girl is missing. That's the story.

“Why were you hiding in the first place?” the cops ask again.

John learned quickly that nothing in this neighbourhood is normal. A women's hockey league, for god's sake, that should have tipped him off. And then that little man hanging out with that scar-faced man. Loitering. Drunks. Kidnapping all around. John thinks later that Dayton's neighbourhood is shit. It is certainly not a good street for his daughter to grow up on, and he's pretty sure that if things had gone better that night he could have used this information to sway the judge to his side if there ever was a custody battle.

The funny thing (something John muses on in the future) is that the two men, the screaming neighbours, the cops, even the dog, the hours of questions in the rain and then the police station, the missing girl, that wasn't even the worst part. That wasn't so bad. It was what happened after all of that. All that after-stuff that landed on him, with the police, the court, the judge, all that crap that took his baby away from him. Permanently. Forever. Dayton won, didn't she? That was worse than anything.

While the man comes past John with the girl, the dog has hold of John's ankle — first his pants, then quickly and viciously, the ankle itself. The skin, the bone. The dog gnaws and bends and cracks. John is hitting at the dog with his fists, smacking and punching it. And later it's not the terror of the dog attack but it's the image of the scar-faced man as he came down the street towards where he was hobbling towards Dayton and her friend, where they were standing out front shouting. That man's face haunts John. In the night, in the rain, in the dark, with the light from the street shining down, the man looked as if he were wearing a mask. As if he had stepped from the stills of a horror movie. His mouth was open but was warped by the crack down the middle. The shadows distorted everything.

John can feel the warmth from the blood on his ankle (he is sure his ankle is broken). He lunges out from the bush and into the driveway.

Dayton is there, getting out of her car, shaking slightly, pale in the streetlight. Her friend (Trish, he later finds out) starts shouting, already calling
911
. Then the man, his face split in half, barrels down the street towards them. Everyone soaking wet. Shouting. The cops come. A girl is missing.

A girl is missing.

That girl. He saw her go.

The bottle of pills John has to take later for the pain in his ankle has a label: “Take With Food.” What John finds interesting, in his drugged haze, is that the picture signifying “Take With Food” is toast. Toast and crackers. Little square crackers, drawn in white over a black background. Four small dots on each one of them. And a slice of bread, that distinctive shape of it. Toast and crackers. Take With Food. This fascinates John, which is good, because otherwise he'd be in agony. He wonders why the label doesn't have a glass of milk on it — usually recommended to soothe the stomach if pills are strong. The little crackers make him smile. They are cute with their little dots, the kind of crackers he got on his tray in the police station when they offered him some soup after all those hours of questioning him. Soda crackers, he thinks they are called, and he doesn't know why they are called that and he ponders it for hours.

At first the parents thought the scarred man had taken their daughter. Tom, the father, came screaming down the front porch in his boxer shorts, no shirt, and began attacking him. The police held him off. The mother was taken off in an ambulance. Something about her back, about fainting, about pain, maybe a slipped disk.

Tom said, “You were stalking her. At school, in the playground, at home. Standing outside our house, looking up at her window.”

The scar-faced man said no. Denied everything. Mentioned the little man in the brown suit. But no one believed him because he looked like that. Until John stepped in and mentioned the little man in the brown suit and Trish began screaming hysterically, saying something about pamphlets and pedophiles and bears. Then they believed him. Then they believed both of them.

The police said they were going to find him. “Don't worry,” they said. “He can't have gone far.”

The scar-faced man's face was horrific.

John saw it, his face, one last time in the police station. The man was being led through a hallway to be questioned. His face in the harsh fluorescent light even worse than in the shadows.

The dog wasn't put to sleep. Although he should have been, considering the permanent damage he did to John's ankle. John will always walk with a limp now. George Clooney with a limp. But John was a trespasser, they said. The dog was merely protecting his family.

“You see,” Dayton says. Later. “You see why I had to take my daughter and leave you? Do you see?”

John was hoping that when he finally saw Dayton he would be much more distinguished, much more manly and in control of the situation. He didn't expect to be bleeding and crying a little, limping into the back of a police car. Lights flashing.

The neighbours on the street stand together. The rain is hard, cold, unforgiving. Dayton walks up to him, then. She approaches him and leans into the window of the police car and says, “You get this.” She puts her hands up and signifies the entire street, the houses, the world, the sky, the rain. “You get this. This here. You get what you deserve.”

John sits in the police car awkwardly. He can hear the radio blasting in and out — “suspect sighted,” “shelter,” “no girl.”

Afterwards, after they let him go, after they are satisfied that he had nothing to do with it, and when he is finally boarding the plane back to California, storing his crutches with the stewards and then limping back to his seat, John thinks, “She's wrong. I didn't deserve any of this.” When the plane takes off and begins to climb it feels to John as if his foot is going to explode, as if the broken bone is splintering and is going to stab him in the brain. Kill him. Instantly.

But not quickly enough.

John isn't sure what happened to that missing girl, but he is sure that he never got to see his daughter that night. He went all that way, he suffered through all of that, and he never laid eyes on his child. His baby girl remains missing for him.

Parkville News

Columnist, C.L. Douglas

On the beat since 1965

After the arrest of the Rooming House Pedophile (as he was immediately labelled following Judge Snider's media publication ban yesterday), the director of the Abernackie Men's Shelter, Art Spack, who had met the accused several times when the Shelter men got together with the Rooming House men, has been quoted as saying that the man was “quiet, kept to himself and wouldn't kill a fly.” Despite this assurance, Rebecca Shutter, 12 years old, is still missing. She has been missing for 30 hours and counting. Rumour has it that the accused isn't aware of the girl, has no idea what the police are talking about and “didn't do anything.” We have heard that he will plead not guilty and is currently being held without bail. There will be psychiatric tests, of course, and I, for one, would like to see if there is a connection between his behaviour and the Tourette's-like symptoms he displays. It's a chicken or egg situation. Does this man's difference make him commit crimes or does he commit crimes because he is different? This makes me wonder about the other characters (again, because of the media publication ban we cannot publish the names of those involved), the man whose face was split in half from an accident with a snow shovel when he was young, or the California man who was intending to kidnap his own child back from her mother. What role did they play that night? Stay tuned for the most interesting trial Parkville has ever seen.

A fundraiser is being organized at the Local Legion 21 by Rebecca Shutter's friends. Please help by donating what you can or by registering to take part in the searches. Yellow ribbons are also available for your trees. The more volunteers, the better. Parkville News has already donated $1,000 and our staff has committed to volunteering on a rotating basis. Please do your part to help bring Rebecca Shutter home.